Schwartz Center envisions sustainable future through partnerships

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Apr 24, 2014 at 4:47 PMApr 24, 2014 at 4:59 PM

Schwartz Center for Children CEO Mary Hodgson is only the third person to lead the nonprofit since its start in 1947. Now in her fifth year there, Hodgson believes creating partnerships, like the recent agreement with Southcoast Hospitals Group, is the best path to solidifying the center's financial base and ensuring the long-term fulfillment of its mission.

Schwartz Center for Children CEO Mary Hodgson is only the third person to lead the nonprofit since its start in 1947. Now in her fifth year there, Hodgson believes creating partnerships, like the recent agreement with Southcoast Hospitals Group, is the best path to solidifying the center's financial base and ensuring the long-term fulfillment of its mission.

This interview has been edited and condensed for publication.

Q: What brought you to the Schwartz Center?

A: What drew me to the organization was its stellar reputation. Then when I came for a tour the first time, I mean, they had me at hello. You see the children and you see our staff and our staff are just an amazing group of people. I say it over and over again, but I think what's so special is that they see abilities, not disabilities. They celebrate every child's uniqueness and their disabilities are just a little thing we work past.

Q: What are you most proud of accomplishing here?

A: What I'm most proud of is starting the path for sustainability for the future of the mission. I think the organization has always been on a rocky path and basically what happens is little angels appear, here and there, and help us through. But I think, as you grow, you just get to the point where you're serving so many children and your payroll is so big (with about 110 employees), that you can't continue on that way.

Q: How does the Schwartz Center fund its work?

A: We largely get funded through school districts. They pay our school tuition which is $2 million a year. Then we also have insurance-based payments as well as the state as a backup with Medicaid. So it's largely based on some sort of government funding, because a lot of our families are on Medicaid.

However, when you look at the funding challenges of the state, I think most of our types of organizations are saying 30 percent of revenue needs to come from fundraising. So we really need to get to the point where we are raising $2 million every year, and we are hovering around or approaching $1 million now.

It's a big difference and it's a big difference in a community that has a lot of need, but yet not a lot of support for that. The demographics are not ideal. But that's the beauty of the diversity of our market too.

Q: How did the Southcoast Hospitals Group partnership come about?

A: Southcoast came to us and said, 'Would you mind taking on our children because we're not going to offer these services in New Bedford anymore.' We said sure, because we weren't going to let children go, but we also weren't sure how we were going to make it work.

So I went up to the State House and was eventually channeled into the Medicaid program where I tried to advocate, asking them, 'Can you help us, because there's a need that we have. There is a list of children who are sometimes waiting a year for services.' We tried to work through those channels and didn't have any luck and I basically went back to Southcoast and said, 'Can you help us?' And they said, 'Of course.' So it's been great.

Basically the partnership is Southcoast services happening here (as of June 1). Much like they have outpatient services in various locations, they are offering rehab services here, but we are helping deliver them.

Q: Will there be other partnerships?

A: We do health care as well as education. Obviously, Southcoast is in the health care world, so we are looking at partners that are in the other areas of education that we deal with too. Probably by the end of our fiscal year, June 30, I'm hoping to have another partnership worked out.

Q: Is the Schwartz Center a model that should be replicated elsewhere?

A: Obviously we've had great success from an individual child and family point of view, but it has not been sustainable and that's what we are dealing with now. We've been relying on our angels and I think we've grown so much that unless an archangel comes along, it's going to be hard. What I would love to do is to find a school district that wants to partner with us to create a structure that is the best of both coming together and I believe we that can do this. A model that will provide the supports that are needed for the families and the children and it would pull together the pieces that are so difficult to pull together right now. And it would be cost effective. I think we can create that model and we can then help other communities to create that model.

Q: How would you describe this point in time for the Schwartz Center?

A: I think it's sort of a pause in the road. There's construction ahead and you're looking at the construction that's unfolding and saying, 'We still have to take these kids on this ride with us and how are we going to support that? How are we going to build even greater support than we currently give around our children and our families?' I think what it takes is community support. It takes the expertise and the kind of staffing that we have. And it takes business expertise, because you're running an organization that is a business.

Q: Do you have difficulty finding staff?

A: We do and where we tend to struggle is in the area of therapists and teachers. Our pay scale and benefits scale is really low compared to public schools, and we don't have summers off. I feel one of the things that we need to start working on is accepting that challenge as part of who we are. We can be a training ground. So you come out of school, you come to work for us, you are going to be far above others because of the intensity of the training you will get and the complexity of the challenges the children have that we work with. Again it's part of that partnering.

We will get folks ready to go out into the community.

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